Tools for journalists: Playing with tame.it

Tame.it since become one of those tools which is part of daily life without even thinking about it, largely because of this:

and this:

In short, Tame.it looks at your Twitter feed and sends a daily and weekly list of the ‘most important’ links shared by people you follow on Twitter.

I’m not entirely sure how it determines important – looking at it, I think it’s probably a mix of number of shares and number of people choosing to share a link.

In short, it does what so many other aggregation tools have tried to do in the past and distil the best of Twitter. But rather than insist on some sort of personalisation to determine what it shows, Tame.it seems to just rely on only content with links in, and then the frequency with which that link is seen on your timeline.

New Twitter tools come and go every week, so when a newish one appears and becomes part of your daily routine, as tame.it has for me, it’s worth sharing.

For journalists, it has some other uses as well:

This is the main page you see when you log into tame.it Highlights include:

1: The time period tool at the top which lets you determine how far back you want Tame.it to look

2: The links results, which filters links based on how often it’s seen them on your timeline. You can then click on the result to see who is sharing it, and what they are saying

3: The most popular hashtags column is an interesting way of grouping what people are saying.

4: Users being mentioned in your timeline – useful to see who is talking to who.

Tame.it does have paid-for options which allow you to filter specific lists you have set up on Twitter, and also allows you to perform a variety of advanced searches if you are prepared to pay for it.

For me, though, it’s the daily emails which are proving remarkably valuable.